November 19th - Santa Cruzin'

The Bike Tour’s third annual trip to Almaden Country Day School was a blast. After the flat but long cycle, we arrived just as the middle school was wrapping up a play. We got to work with the 5th graders – who especially enjoyed the Organic Corn game, got the 6th graders pumped for Catalina with a slide show, and revisited our friends from the 7th & 8th grade. A few lucky riders got to read “Diary of a Worm” with the Kindergarten as well. The last two times we have come to Almaden, we have been invited to their Thanksgiving Feast that is prepared by students and parents. I’ve heard it’s the second largest Thanksgiving festival this side of the Mississippi, but maybe I made that up. Because our schedule changed a bit this year, we were a week early for the official fest – but the 7th grade parents wouldn’t let a little scheduling change get in the way of that!! We were treated to a delicious organic lunch; soup, salad, pasta, fruit from their trees at home, chips, cookies and much more! We dined with our gracious hosts the 7th graders, and left the school satiated.

Danny and Sean actually took a side detour and visited DeAnza Community College and the Kirsch Environmental Center ~ check it out on-line. They got the first LEED Platinum certification for any building in the USA at a community college.

After that we had a big climb ahead of us. It was only about 20ish miles until our campsite, Big Basin. It’s just that about 13 of those miles were in the Santa Cruz mountains. I took off with a lady peleton; Julie Meagan and Libby. After about a half an hour of climbing we stopped for a snack, stretching, and photo taking. Travis pulled up in the bus to check in with us. We asked just about how much farther we had to go. Spirits sunk when he told us that if the length of his arm was the full distance we were going, we were at about his fingernail. It was slow going, so slow in fact that Jenna had enough time to watch a banana slug crossing the road. But we made up ways to amuse ourselves. Libby made up songs about the mountains and biking really really slow. Lissa challenged Abigail to bike faster than she could walk… Lissa (the walker) won, but returned to the saddle when Abigail reminded her that this is not the Sustainable Living Walking Tour.

Turns out Travis might have been exaggerating about only being a miniscule way up the hill, but it got us in the right mindset for the day’s climb, and the future ones in Big Sur. Best of all we had the redwoods to keep us entertained with sweeping views of the mountains and a beautiful golden setting sun. Most of us reached the campsite by dark, and the rest of us were swooped up into the bus for a ride into the campsite.

We had been enjoying unseasonably warm weather in San Francisco and San Jose, just about until this point. When the sun went down in the redwoods that day it got cooold. Some waiting at the camp decided to head out to the sites we had reserved. And we waited, and waited. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so we piled into the tiny womens bathroom. Eight of us were huddled in there at it’s highest capacity playing team building initiatives… you can take the instructors out of camp, but you can’t take the camp out of the instructors. Matty P, our friend from seasons past came and joined us for a bit as we hunkered down for the night.



It was a chilly morning, but we had a nice downhill into Boulder Creek out of the mountains. Julie and I stopped into an antique shop and found an old booklet of Catalina postcards that we’ve never seen in Avalon.

We all met up at the home of Kristin and Mark Sullivan in Capitola, lovingly referred to as the Straw Bale house. The home features;

• walls constructed of renewable straw from a farmer they knew
• highly effective passive solar design
• extensive water catchment system
• use of salvaged wood
• native plant landscaping
• an organic garden and more!

Thanks to Barbara Graves, Kristin and Mark Sullivan, and members of the cycle group that showed up.

We wrappd the day up at New Brighton State Beach. I woke up in the morning with huge bags under my eyes. Not just “I climbed over a mountain and slept in a tent” eyes, bags so big they actually distort my eye shape. This is happened the last two times I’ve stayed here on the bike tour, unfortunately on days that were on or surrounding my birthday. This caused me to be convinced I’d gotten a bunch of wrinkles and aged overnight. In a conversation about this phenomenon with Heather she mentioned that I was probably having a reaction to something at the campsite. Oh… Guess that explains why years came off my face after moving around for 20 minutes. This year instead of having a panic attach, I just woke up half an hour before everyone else.

In the morning we will stop by a local homestead and get our first taste of Big Sur, ending up in Andrew Molera.